Friday, March 23, 2007

Touring the U of C

Need I say more?

Soon someone will graffiti on that thing "... until the arrival of Iccy".

But first things first - this morning I had another look at what was offered bike-wise on craigslist.com. Lowest I found was $60 for a functional-looking bike somewhere all the way in Cicero, lacking fenders of course that would protect my fancy clothes from the every-so-often-present precipitation around here. Most halfway-decent bikes were priced around $100 and up on there so I checked out target.com. Told you, the best store on earth. They had new "cruiser" bikes (including fenders) for $79.99. Granted, including shipping this bike put me out about 110 bucks but I believe judging from the prices on craigslist (someone's bound to be paying for all that stuff?) it should have great re-sell value in two and a half months when I return to Germany.

It should be delivered some time next week.

Then, we went out.

On our way exploring south, the first thing we came across was some art school apparently. I'll let you judge for yourselves.

Next we stumbled across the beautiful Gerald Ratner Athletics Center.
Naturally, it's primarily for students so it'd really help if I could somehow get a U of C student ID. I'm sure that'd also help with a lot of other stuff. We'll see.
The "Nuclear Energy"-sculptureas well as some other pointersled us on the right track.

There it was.So pretty.I felt right at home.
Then we found the place I'm sure Phèdre would love.
Never passing up an opportunity to make good money, there were tons of U of C/Pritzker merchandise available. And I, never passing up an opportunity to be a sucker for that kind of stuff, walked out with some of it in addition to a nice new book on EKGs (it's time I actually started to know what I'm doing) and a terribly ugly hip-length white "coat" (jacket, really).

No matter. We went on to find that the "University market", defined as grocery store on Google Earth was a very small and as always down here very overpriced little shoppe.

Not impressed, we returned home to deposit our gadgets from the university bookstore. We found an e-mail from one of Trillian's friends in Detroit saying that Walmart was actually even cheaper than Target. Intrigued, I looked up the closest Walmart stores on the internet and found one that was about exactly as far away as the Target store, just in the opposite direction.

So Trillian and I took a bus a couple of stations west and then went south all the way on the red line. Even though we ended up being yelled at by just one beggar on the train and only two obviously mentally deranged people held their monologues too close to us for comfort, we decided to turn around and head back while we were waiting for the bus on 95th street.

This was mainly because we felt very out of place not having seen any non-African American faces since 55th street - and the many faces that were there didn't exactly smile at us (at least not in a sane way). So the rich white folks got scared and ran away to the suburbs, joined the NRA, got three guns each and voted republican.

You'll notice that there are no pictures of these events.

So we ended up scurrying back north all the way to Target - did I mention it's the best store on earth? And we went on shopping happily.

On the way back, the humid, foggy weather invited me to take some more pictures outside the Target store and on the platform of the L-train.

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